My blog

A few weeks ago, my employer strongly suggested that I should take a longer vacation. After some negotiations, we agreed that I really needed the vacation and that it would last twelve months - but without the possibility of return.
The farewells to coworkers lasted for nine days straight - almost like a wedding in the Sultanate of Brunei. Fortunately, my liver was exceptionally tolerant, and I came to the conclusion that leaving is not for wimps and requires the health of a horse.
Today, as the IT experts say, I press the big button marked "RESET" and, sipping whiskey and cola, I wait at Charles de Gaulle for the plane that will take me in thirteen hours to the equator, where in the coming weeks I intend to resolutely and exclusively indulge in Asian pleasures...

A thirteen-hour flight in economy class is not exactly what bunnies like. Luckily, I got the last seat in the middle row near the aisle, so without significantly affecting my fellow passengers, I was able to do a few push-ups and squats every hour or so, and I was able to get off the plane under my own steam.
A young French couple was sitting next to me. They were so focused on each other (were they in love or what?) that I knew nothing would come of our conversation. It gave me time to read a "how to be a writer" guide from cover to cover on my new Kindle. Interesting.
Singapore greeted me with a humid wall of heat. You can count on that all year round. As I read in the guidebook, the lowest temperature in history was recorded here in 1934 and it was 19.4 degrees, a temperature for which I thank God on vacation in Łeba.
I have exceptional luck with talkative taxi drivers. The one who took me to the hotel told me the whole history of the state of Singapore during the twenty-minute ride there, but unfortunately, from the list of Polish popes and pianists, he only knew Lewandowski.
Upon arrival at the hotel, I immediately went to the fifty-seventh floor to swim and take in the best view of the city. I kept my eyes from closing with a margarita and decided to satisfy my emerging hunger in Chinatown.
A good friend took me to Chinatown by Uber. Singapore's Chinatown is unlike any other I've seen before. It's simply clean. It's probably the result of the cleanliness and order craze that everyone here has.
For dinner I had typical Singaporean dishes. Laksa soup - thick, somewhere between curry and fish. Noodles, egg, pieces of crispy pancake, shrimp and something that resembled slices of octopus but tasted completely different - unfortunately the waitress and I couldn't agree on what it was.
And then the "singapore chilli crab". I had never eaten a crab that size and was afraid of the innards. But it turned out they had been removed before serving. I fought with it for a long time and would not let go of any of the legs.
Both the soup and the crab - heaven in your mouth.

The hotel breakfast was very rich. However, having a choice of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian dishes, which do not at all remind me of the first meal of the day, I chose scrambled eggs with bacon, and after a good portion of fat, protein and carbohydrates I went wild with a healthy plate of exotic fruits with names and flavours unknown to me. The most interesting - as I later read on the internet - was the pitaya fruit. It looked like a beetroot with black sesame seeds stuck in it - soft and sweet, with a taste and consistency reminiscent of Polish kiwi.
I started my tour of Singapore by walking through the gardens with those characteristic trumpet-shaped towers, covered with plants that can be found on every postcard from here. I also entered two huge pavilions covered with a roof reminiscent of the Złote Tarasy in Warsaw. The first one enclosed a piece of jungle with a waterfall. And the second one had some gigantic collection of trees, cacti and tulips. During the walk, you could hear soft music (I think it was Morricone, but without my wife I'm not good at recognizing what's playing) and it would have been a really nice experience if not for the zillion cameras clicking around.
The next item on the agenda was the Singapore Ferris wheel. It may not be as big as the London Eye, but the view from the top is breathtaking. I was fascinated by the mechanism of this technological marvel and I couldn't resist sharing my delight with an Australian I had just met, for whom Singapore was also the first stop on a long journey - but in the opposite direction of the globe. He replied, "it doesn't matter how it works, what matters is that we spent our money well" - I mean, a philosopher, and he looked like an engineer.
On my way to Santos Island I got to know the Singapore metro. Modern and clean. The only thing that can be criticized is the lack of musicians earning money by hat and predicting the end of the world. For drinking and eating you can be fined five hundred Singapore dollars, so Krysia Pawłowicz with her salads would have a big problem here. Three quarters of the people here are Chinese, and the rest of the faces have Malay, Indian, or tourist features. Apart from tourists, everyone has one thing in common - they are slim. The main audible language is Mandarin (as everywhere else in the world), but the written language is of course English, although often alongside English signs you can also see Mandarin and that funny Tamil.
You can get to Santos Island either by train or cable car. I chose the latter. The cable car is suspended 50 meters, but getting on it is impossible to avoid reminiscing about skiing in the Dolomites - the gondolas are identical, I checked, they were manufactured by the same company as most in Italy - Doppelmayr.
The island was taken over by American consumer icons: Universal Studios, Starbucks, KFC, etc.
As befits a big boy, I chose the race track. Downhill in a primitive, dual-purpose vehicle - it turns and brakes, and all the fun comes from gravity. Return to base in a ski chairlift, to which your vehicle is attached.
And then a visit to the aquarium - done on a grand scale. For lunch I resisted KFC and at Malaysian Street Food I chose cuttlefish with green kang kong, sesame and crushed peanuts - good, but not mind-blowing - like eating in a shopping mall.
I planned dinner in Little India. I thought about some tikka masala in the Singapore version. The Indian district, although consistent with my idea of India, which I have never been to, turned out to be inconsistent with my aesthetic of a place to eat. Instead of eating, I visited an Islamic temple and a Thai massage parlor. And for dinner, a few hundred meters away, I ate "bak kut tech", which loosely translated means tea from pig bones. But in reality it was a delicious broth with ribs, cabbage, mushrooms and crispy pancakes.
Before going to bed I went for a beer at a nearby bar with Chinese karaoke. It's impossible to describe, so I won't even try. Fortunately, the bartender let me simplify it and switched to American hits for a few songs. He didn't expect that people in Europe can also do karaoke.

The second and last night I slept in the hotel without breakfast, so as soon as I got out of bed I went into town in search of coffee and food. Right next to the hotel I found a real Asian place with a latte and a hamburger, in which instead of beef there was a potato pancake and bacon, cheese and egg. Plus the obligatory fries with ketchup.
And the next two hours, until check-out, I spent by the pool with the Saturday edition of the Electoral Gazette on my Kindle (interesting things are happening there). The cruel sun was shining and I returned to my room with a completely different skin color. As soon as I got up from the lounger, a terrible downpour started out of nowhere, so on the way to the metro that was supposed to take me to the airport, I had to hide to wait out the storm. A hair salon just happened to come by. My late mother always told me that I had a round head, thanks to the fact that when I was a baby, she always put me to sleep on my tummy. I never had the courage to show the world this roundness - but here, far from the world, it's a completely different matter. And so I resembled a monk, and combined with the orange I wore today, I think I'll easily find my Gray.
There was a small problem at the airport. At check-in, a very nice airline employee informed me that she could not let me into Malaysia without showing a ticket for departure from that country. And unfortunately I did not have a ticket. I had about 45 minutes until the gate closed, which meant I had time to buy the ticket. I started with a coffee at Starbucks and finding the internet – which was not difficult, because there is free internet at the airport in Singapore. I bought a ticket and then nervously counted down the minutes until I received an email with the ticket – “kiwi.com” declared that it would do it within 60 minutes of buying the ticket. Fortunately, they did it after 15 minutes, so I was able to board.
The flight to Langkawi lasted twenty hours. I was sitting next to a British couple my age. She was looking out the window the whole way, and he was turning the pages of the book he was reading with his right hand the whole way, and he was tenderly massaging her forearm with his left hand. Damn, I have the impression that only lovers fly to and from Asia. Speaking of cuddling, I read today that it stimulates a large area of the skin, which causes the pituitary gland to release oxytocin, which causes calmness, trust and a sense of security. I need to find someone to cuddle as soon as possible.
Malaysian Airlines is supposedly one of the safest. Despite the fact that out of all the Boeing 777s produced, three were scrapped, two of which were Malaysian, but then again, one of those two was never found, and the other was shot down over Ukraine. In any case, my Boeing landed safely on a Malaysian island at 17:20.
First observation: in Malaysia, the vast majority of women wear headscarves, and quite a few wear burkas. It is a Muslim country after all. Visas are not required, but the queue is long because they take a picture of everyone and take fingerprints – especially children, who are known to be the first to do something.
You can't just take a taxi. You have to stand in line at a special window, and after waiting for your taxi, you say the name of the hotel, and the lady issues a special receipt with the taxi number and collects the money. With the receipt, you go to the taxi rank and look for a taxi with the number on the receipt. It reminded me a bit of Bareja.
It was 22 kilometers to the hotel. Langawi is the largest of the archipelago of the same name, consisting of over a hundred islands, mostly uninhabited, right on the border with Thailand.
On all these islands there live under one hundred thousand people, eighty percent of whom are Malays. My town is Kuah. 30 thousand inhabitants. I walked all over it, length and breadth in search of some nice dinner. It's not really my cup of tea. I feel like I'm in Egypt here. I read in the guidebook that it's a paradise island, duty-free zone and parties until dawn. There is a duty-free zone. In the Egyptian version. You can buy alcohol - but only if you show your passport - and drink it in your hotel room - because it's a Muslim country. You won't find any alcohol in pubs or in the hotel. Luckily, before 10 pm, when the whole town dies down, I managed to eat (fish in chili, garlic and lime, Tom Yum soup and fried shrimp), get a massage (the young Malay girl knew how to do it) and buy a bottle of scotch whisky (PLN 22 for 0.7). And in the hotel I had a small party. Even though no one came, it was still fun.

For breakfast in my Islamic hotel I gorged myself on oriental oddities. I also had to hydrate my body a lot after yesterday's evening reaction to the lack of alcohol in the city - fortunately there was plenty of it in the room.
After breakfast, I packed my backpack with the necessary accessories: swimming trunks, sunglasses, Kindle, and negotiated a good rate with the hotel taxi driver for an all-day ride around the island.
Azir, who became my travel companion for today, turned out to be a modest and very nice guide. He told me about King Abdul, who is over ninety years old and sets religious standards, his beautiful wife Arrissa, who is a teacher at a school that pays 1400 ringgit (one riggit is almost 1 złoty) and his daughter Aisha, whom he drives to school every day. Azir prays five times a day and understood that we, Catholics, go to church once a week. His wife, like most women on the island, has to cover her legs and arms and wear a headscarf, called a tudung. Azir explained to me that burkas, of which there are also a few here, are only worn by tourists from the Middle East.
We started our tour of the island with a visit to the lovely zoo. Then a motorboat ride to the sea with nice views, feeding fish and eagles, a cave with bats.
Then we headed to the farthest, wildest end of the island, where Azir said the prettiest beach was.
Before we got there, the Four Season Resort rose up in front of us – yes, the nicer hotels are called “resorts” here. I decided to have dinner there. The resort occupied a huge area. It took me a long time to find the reception – well, maybe I wasn’t in a big hurry to find it, I took a roundabout route along the beach, with a short nap in a hammock. Unfortunately, at the reception it turned out that the hotel restaurants were “overbooked” and they wouldn’t find a place for me. Well, apparently something in my English or attire was wrong.
But there's no such thing as a silver lining - I invited my friend Azir for lunch at a cheap beach bar - the only one in the area, by the way. He ordered Hokkien Mae Mee (noodles with shrimp), and I ordered a coconut and two soups: Thai Tom Yum and a Malaysian one, which also had Mee in its name. Everything was delicious. We talked about the Malaysian education system.
After lunch, I spent a few hours at the beach. Łeba wins in terms of sand, Langkawi in terms of water and air temperature and views. Unfortunately, the island's biggest attraction, one of the reasons I came here, the gondola ride up a 700-meter mountain covered in jungle and a walk on the sky terrace, was closed due to renovation and preparations for the season - Malaysia is currently in its lowest tourist season.
On the way back, Azir showed me a Malaysian market full of real wonders, where a young pair of musicians from Argentina were collecting for their world tour – she a cello, he a guitar.
At the end of the day, Azir left me for dinner in the "eat what you catch" formula. I had long since given up fishing, but in this restaurant, it turned out to be very simple - the waiter fishes out the food with a landing net from the aquarium. I asked for two mantis prawns and a hybrid grouper, or as I later read on the internet, mantis shrimps that can imitate the sounds of other shrimps and a hybrid grouper, which Malaysians created in vitro by combining tiger grouper eggs with giant grouper sperm. It's a bit scary, but it tasted delicious - a bit like our carguelena.
And so I returned to my room, where another bottle of frozen blended scotch whiskey was waiting for me...

After breakfast, a three-hour ferry took me almost 120 miles south to the island of Penang, known as Prince of Wales Island, which the British had bought from the local sultan in the late eighteenth century and only returned in 1957.
The ferry arrived in the island's largest city - Georgetown. I started my stay on the island with lunch in one of the Food Courts, of which there are plenty here - these are roofed eateries where they sell freshly prepared food for pennies. In general, when it comes to food, here and in all of Malaysia it seems that it is the main meaning of people's lives. There are plenty of options for food, pubs, street stalls, mobile eateries, shops, booths.
My hotel, in the very center, has one drawback - it is strictly forbidden to bring duranium fruit, but in the toilet I discovered my favorite device from Japan, which squirts hot water exactly where you need it, at the exact moment you want it.
I spent the whole afternoon wandering the streets around the city centre. The city has an incredible colonial charm. It looks as if time has stopped here, and many of the buildings date back to Victorian times. The city is a mix of cultures and flavours: Chinese, Hindu, Islamic and Malaysian. There are plenty of temples here – I saw an Anglican church, a Buddhist temple and a mosque within a few dozen metres of each other.
In one of the Buddhist temples I lit incense and threw a bundle of cards with mantras into the hot stove. When I was entering the temple, an old Chinese man stopped me and asked where I was from. I said Poland. And he said, as if asking: "Poland. Warsaw?" I said yes. When I was leaving, the old Chinese man was still standing there and stopped me again asking: "Poland communism finished?" I told him yes, and thirty years ago. He accepted it with obvious relief, and I have the satisfaction of being able to bring him this news.
Thirsty and tired from the heat, I took a break for a beer. Unlike the Islamic island of Langkawi, Pendang is definitely more Chinese, so alcohol is not a problem here. I entered a Beer Garden full of old Chinese and ordered my favorite beer in Malaysia – Tiger. The bartender handed it to me, then started hanging around the pub, came up to me, patted me on the back and said “You good man” and started massaging my neck. I thought that the massage was probably included in the price of the beer and gently thanked me. Especially since my plan for tonight was to get a massage from a professional. However, my bartender did not give up: “You need a girl?” And then I noticed that selling beer is not the main source of income for this garden. This is what happened to me today.
Before leaving, I bought a thick guidebook about eight Southeast Asian countries, which recommended three restaurants in Georgetown. I chose one for dinner tonight. It was 8 p.m. and I was the only customer. But once I was in, it was embarrassing to leave. While I ate, eight waiters in an empty dining room stared at my plates. The food was fabulous: Indonesian shrimp soup, Szechuan tofu and mushroom soup, and duck.

After a good breakfast, I picked up my fresh one and a half kilograms of clothes from the laundry, or rather the "laundry service", as the British Queen ordered Malaysians to call this service.
Then I visited the residence of the Asian Rockefeller – Cheong Fatt Tze, who was the Minister of Commerce and the richest Chinese of his generation. He owned half of the Chinese banks, built railways, produced wine. He had eight wives, countless children, and fathered his last son at the age of 74, in 1914, two years before his death, from which – interestingly – he was not saved by the fortune that his sons squandered in a flash. He forbade the sale of his residence – The Blue Mansion, which impresses with its grandeur and exquisiteness, to the family until the death of his last son, which happened in 1990, and which allowed the Malaysians to restore the splendor of this place.
After sightseeing, I got on a bus and went out of town to the town of Batu Feringhhi, where, as I read in the guidebook, there is the largest bathing area on the island with beaches and lots of tourists.
I quickly ran away from there. I only had time to eat dinner. There was a small bar filled with elderly British people who looked as if they had been eating there since Churchill's time. A young Chinese woman was bustling around in the open kitchen. I stood there for a few minutes, mesmerized, watching her turn the wok over the gas. I ordered tom yum - this time in Chinese version and Malaysian chicken curry, and then I tried to recognize and remember all the ingredients of these dishes that she threw on the fire. It was divine.
After lunch, the most informed person, the taxi driver, told me that if I wanted to see a really nice beach, he could take me to a boat that would take me there. We agreed on a price - because in Malaysia, the price for a taxi must be agreed before the ride, regardless of whether there is a meter inside or not.
After a ten-minute cruise, the captain of the motorboat dropped me off at Monkey Beach, a pristine beach inhabited by a dozen or so backpackers and a monkey. The place definitely looked like it was avoided by tourists with wheeled suitcases. The locals had all the necessary facilities for life, although primitive and probably built by themselves: a bar, a pub and a beach volleyball court.
I immediately went to a bar. There I met David, who introduced himself as "David, but not Beckham". In a brief conversation, in which I learned that Russians who came here didn't start drinking until after noon, and Australians as soon as they rolled out of bed, David-No-Beckham quickly dissuaded me from the idea of watching monkeys in the jungle, and my life became even happier within eight minutes of meeting him. And that was because of herbal medicine, of which David-No-Beckham was a passionate enthusiast and effective advocate.
I spent the next three hours in a hammock, just behind the bar of David-No-Beckham's bar, while he played "I Shot the Sheriff," "Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be Alright," and "Don't Be Afraid, People Don't Shoot." And those were some of the best three hours of the trip.
I had dinner on one of the most beautiful streets in the old city of Georgetown – Armenian Street. A Peranakan restaurant, invented by Chinese immigrants who combined Chinese cuisine with Malaysian spices. I ordered cucur udang (fried shrimp and beans in butter with tofu and cucumber), jawi bamieh (lamb with tomatoes and Peranakan spices, okra and Benggali bread), and yogurt with mango and dessert (red velvet galletes with cream cheese). I love Pedang.
And then just a foot massage, where they already considered me a regular customer, and a glass of whiskey before bed.

Today I decided to do some sightseeing. Although I haven't done anything else in the last few days, you have to have a plan.
Bus number 203, for two riggit, or less than two zlotys, I went to the largest Buddhist temple in Malaysia – Kek Lok Si. It is a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists from this part of Asia. It is actually a complex of many temples with a thirty-meter bronze Buddha on top and a pagoda in the first third - Chinese, in the second third Thai and in the third third - Burmese. No Polish parish would be ashamed of the number of shops with devotional items.
It took me about two hours to visit. In 35-degree heat it is really not easy, especially since there are countless stairs to climb.
In the meantime, I was enjoying some juice squeezed from bamboo. They squeeze it with a special device and serve it in a plastic bag with ice, to which they tie a string so it's easy to carry. It looks a bit like a urine sample for analysis, it's bloody sweet, but it quenches your thirst perfectly.
I also got to know a new fruit – soursop, whose Polish name, as the internet says, is: soft-toothed fruit, graviola or guanabana. They make quite a tasty juice from it, which tastes like nothing I've ever eaten/drank. There are plenty of places to buy fruit or juice here, and the most popular are stands on wheels, where the owner cuts out the best and serves it in bags with a skewer stick.
For lunch I had char kway teow – a bit greasy but delicious rice noodles with egg, shrimp, octopus, sprouts, pork, tofu. Without a doubt, when I get back home I will immediately order my family to include this dish in their daily menu.
They also have their own Gubałówka, the seven hundred-meter-high, highest peak on the island, which you can reach by a cable car that looks very similar to the one in Zakopane. From the top, there is a beautiful view of the entire island. Only there do you see how urbanized it is – almost a million people live on a little over two hundred square kilometers.
After returning to the city, I invited my son for a beer to celebrate his birthday. Although we are almost nine thousand kilometers apart, today's technology can work wonders. I proposed a deal - I would give up my twenty-one years in exchange for the charms of Asia. Unfortunately, he did not agree. Naive.
I had dinner at the Indian, the last cuisine from the Penang kitchen tangle that I hadn’t tried yet. The hotel concierge recommended the Kashmir restaurant. I ordered tandori chicken, keema gosht mutter (lamb with green peas), naan, and rice pudding for dessert. Poetry.
After dinner, I said goodbye to the island from the deck of a rickshaw driven by an athletic, seventy-year-old Chinese man who, at the end of the day, took me for a two-hour Thai massage, because if it's a massage, it's in Thai.

Early this morning, I left the beautiful island of Penang with Malaysian Airlines and moved to my last stop in Malaysia - Kuala Lumpur.
It takes about thirty minutes to get from the airport to the city centre by express train, and then a few stops on the metro to the hotel. This last part turned out to be quite a challenge. First, instead of tickets, there are tokens, which every sensible person would like to put into some hole at the gate and search for it in vain. And you simply hold them up to the reader - like a ticket. Second, there is a different entrance to each metro line at Sentral Station, so for a moment I completely lost hope that I would sleep in a bed tonight.
At the hotel it turned out that my room had some problem being ready for me, so I spent the next hour in the shopping mall that my hotel is attached to. I ate some pretty good sushi there. The Malaysian Galeria Mokotów turned out to be no different from the one in Warsaw - well, maybe with one difference - the food court is about ten times bigger. But then again, I'm in a country where instead of "how are you" people say "have you eaten yet" as a greeting.
As compensation for the wait, I was given a bigger room. Unfortunately, it turned out to be some kind of royal apartment - once they put my suitcase in it, I had trouble finding it in this maze of rooms. However, I thought that I would somehow endure this one night and if I didn't have to pee, there was a chance I wouldn't get lost.
And so I set off into the city, starting with the biggest attraction in KL, as every guidebook says, the Petronas Towers. On the way, another Uber driver in Malaysia confirmed that the best, although the only famous representative of our nation is my namesake Lewandowski. I was angry because the Petronas Towers, which for six years, until 2004, was the tallest building in the world, were sold out. And since I had to do something that would take me almost to heaven that day, I climbed, or rather let myself be carried, to the observation deck of only the seventh tallest freestanding tower in the world. The view was incredible.
Then a longer walk, first around the oldest part of the city with colonial evidence of British presence and Hindu-Islamic architecture, and then around Chinatown, which suddenly turns into Little India - every self-respecting metropolis in this part of Asia has these two districts, and for some reason they are adjacent to each other.
Before dinner I faced a real dilemma. Like a frog that can't split into two, unable to decide whether it's smart or beautiful. Tired of constantly getting into Ubers, hungry and thirsty, I suddenly found myself in a passage of elegant restaurants and bars, filled to the brim with Malaysians trying to convince themselves that they're not Asian citizens. And just before entering this mecca of Western consumption, I passed a huge, but genuine and homely-looking, Chinese restaurant. And then there was the problem: where to sit. A little brainstorming and the problem was solved: I ate at the Chinese and drank at the European.
Crab shell stuffed with crab, pork, onion and mushrooms, Thai soup with everything, pork in soy sauce. God, it was so good. I'm pissed, angry and sick at the thought that soon I won't be able to have all this at my fingertips. Or maybe I should just fuck it all up and never come back? I'll have to think about it...